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| New photo update: these skeletons had real cups! |
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| I think there's a drink in his pumpkin. |
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| What was brewing in the cauldron last October? Mulled witch’s cider? |
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| The best ripe apricots in the world from the Santa Barbara Farmers' Market, 2012. How I wish it was always easy to get unprocessed food! |
“There is very clear observational data showing that people who have higher intakes of ultra-processed foods have higher levels of ill-health, whether it be cancer, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, obesity or type 2 diabetes.” (Statement from Dr Sarah Berry, a nutrition expert in the area of cardio-metabolic health at King's College in England.)
The Guardian today has an article titled "Fast food fever: how ultra-processed meals are unhealthier than you think." Understanding ultra processed food (UPF) and its consequences interests me quite a bit. This is a challenging subject: research on the effects of UPF has disclosed its association with obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, dementia, and colon cancer. The article summarizes research on the role of inflammation in these and other health problems, and describes the mechanisms by which UPFs may trigger inflammation. It also discusses some political efforts in the UK to overcome some of the damage that they cause, including improving the foods and educating the consumers. This is a complex and active area of research, which I will not try to duplicate here -- you can read the article if you want details.
The ongoing research has created some understanding of a mechanism by which the food becomes such a risk to one's health. Obviously, humans since prehistoric times have been processing foods by chopping them up, cooking them, fermenting them, and other techniques, but UPF is something new. An expert epidemiologist quoted in the article summarizes:
“The ultra-processed nature of modern food generally means that the complex structure of the plant and animal cells is destroyed, turning it into a nutritionally empty mush that our body can process abnormally rapidly.”
Defining UPF is a scientific issue in itself. Four categories have been defined, but like all continuums, there are issues with classifying some foods. This doesn't mean it's not useful, just a challenge! There are various ways to classify and define processing; the article divides foods into the following groups:
"There are, for example, 678 calories in a Pret a Manger hummus salad, 684 in three Mars bars, and 708 in a portion of a Sainsbury’s fish and chips ready meal. These very similar numbers don’t tell us that the salad provides a third of our recommended daily fibre and half our daily fat; that the fish and chips contain almost half our daily salt but also half our daily protein; or that the chocolate bars would bust our sugar allowance. By only looking at calories – as on restaurant menus – we lose other, much more helpful information."
There's so much to learn and understand in the world of nutrition!
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| A snapshot from my Kindle. |
"Peanuts! At thirty thousand feet! To Arthur Less, anything at high altitude feels miraculous; he simply cannot believe it’s happening. Perhaps it correlates in his system with quasi-forbidden boyhood delights such as flashlight-reading under the covers and smuggling chocolate into a treehouse. An offer of wine and Less shivers at the impossibility. How did they get wine up here? To him, it is as delicious as a cup of lemonade bought from a five-year-old’s stand, which is to say, always delicious. The same goes for the food; when he unwraps the foil to expose microwaved chicken or curdled lasagna, you would think he had found a golden ticket to a chocolate factory. His joy seems endless." (p. 51).
The flying scene in the first book was funnier! A lot of ideas are better the first time.
Well, that's all I have to say. I should keep to my usual habit of never rereading most books.
Review © 2022 mae sander
"The sugar began to darken and smoke as Pearl stirred. When it was almost black, she took a small pot of boiling water and poured its contents onto the sugar, turning her face away as the mixture sizzled and splattered. She would add the blacking to the batter to darken it, but only after she had whipped the butter, added the eggs, flour, spices, and, finally, the mixture of fruits that had been soaking for weeks in dark rum and port. This cake would be a work of art." (Black Cake, p. 117)
“His mother used to say she would make a black cake for Byron and Benny when each of them got married, but neither of them had. Ma’s cake was a work of art, Byron had to admit. That moist, loamy mouthful, the tang of spirits behind the nose. But Byron had never shared his parents’ emotional attachment to the recipe. Tradition, his ma used to say. But whose tradition, exactly? Black cake was essentially a plum pudding handed down to the Caribbeans by colonizers from a cold country. Why claim the recipes of the exploiters as your own?
“Tradition? How about coconut gizzada? How about mango ice cream? How about jerk pork, rice and peas, Scotch bonnet peppers, coconut milk, yellow plantains, and all those flavors that Byron had come to enjoy, thanks to his mother’s cooking? Now, that was what he called island food. But no, these had never been enough for his ma. More than any other recipe, it was the black cake that brought that creamy tone to his mother’s voice. That shine to her eye.” (p. 95)
“What about the classic Christmastime fruit cake? In Britain, it’s often made with cane sugar from the tropics. In the Caribbean, it’s made with raisins and currants imported from colder countries. My grandmother, who was English but spent years living in Trinidad with her missionary parents, makes a divine rum cake, Caribbean style. She calls it black cake. But is it really Caribbean? Cane sugar didn’t even originate in that part of the world. It arrived from Africa, which in turn got it from Asia. So, you tell me, whose cake is it?” (Black Cake, p. 250)
Eventually, when going through their late mother’s kitchen, Benny and Byron find the jar of booze-soaked fruit that she kept behind the canned goods. Then Benny finds her mother’s recipe:
“There it is, where it has always been, a piece of folded, lined notepaper where her mother had scribbled down the recipe for her black cake. Benny unfolds the paper and runs her finger down the list of ingredients. Rum, sugar, vanilla. And the occasional verb. Cream, rub, mix. It is only now that Benny realizes that the recipe has no numbers, no quantities at all. Wait, was it always this way? It’s the same one from her childhood, she’s sure of it. Benny sees, now, that her mother’s recipe was never so much a list of firm quantities and instructions as a series of hints for how to proceed. What Benny learned from her mother had been handed down through demonstration, conversation, and proximity. What Benny learned from her mother was to rely on her own instincts and go on from there.” (p. 296)
There’s much more than cake in this fascinating novel! I definitely recommend it — and thank Evelyn, as it was another of her suggestions. And if you should want to try baking this exotic cake, there are many traditional recipes on the web, including one from the Washington Post here:
Review copyright © 2022 mae sander
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| Squirrel food |
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| Ready for more Michigan games! |
Blog post © 2022 mae sander for mae food dot blogspot.com
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| A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: Original 1943 Dust Jacket |
Most of the time while reading, I felt as though I was reviewing the early life my mother and her two older sisters. At pretty much the same time as in the novel, they were children of a widow, living in an immigrant neighborhood in pretty extreme poverty -- though they grew up in St.Louis, not Brooklyn. I'm pretty sure they felt a lot of kinship with the character of Francie Nolan, Betty Smith's now-enduring creation. They occasionally mentioned the book, in fact, though I don't remember any details of what they said. And they remembered the same changes happening in their world as in the novel: from gaslight to electric, from mostly horse-drawn vehicles to automobiles, from live performances to moving pictures, from wearing long hair to a stylish bob, and so on.
It seems kind of silly to review a book that's been popular for so long, so I'll say only this: the writing still seems fresh, the characters still seem alive, and the pain of being a poor and unfavored child remains with us. To me, Francie is just wonderful! Betty Smith offers her readers vivid descriptions of teachers who were cruel to because the children they taught were poor and mainly immigrants, of the way Francie's mother was raising her children on virtually no money, of the agony of an addicted father who eventually died of alcoholism, and of many other issues that speak as loudly today as they did in 1943.
One example of Francie's mother's resourcefulness: she could make a whole week of meals from a few loaves of unsold bread bought from the bakery when the food shops returned them --
"She’d take a loaf of stale bread, pour boiling water over it, work it up into a paste, flavor it with salt, pepper, thyme, minced onion and an egg (if eggs were cheap), and bake it in the oven. When it was good and brown, she made a sauce from half a cup of ketchup, two cups of boiling water, seasoning, a dash of strong coffee, thickened it with flour and poured it over the baked stuff. It was good, hot, tasty and staying. What was left over, was sliced thin the next day and fried in hot bacon fat. Mama made a very fine bread pudding from slices of stale bread, sugar, cinnamon and a penny apple sliced thin. When this was baked brown, sugar was melted and poured over the top. Sometimes she made what she had named Weg Geschnissen, which laboriously translated meant something made with bread bits that usually would be thrown away. Bits of bread were dipped into a batter made from flour, water, salt and an egg and then fried in deep hot fat." (pp. 41-42).
In fact, there's even more that Francie's mama made from stale bread. And these meals were good and provided almost enough to eat. Later, things got even more difficult. Mama had to invent a game, pretending that they were explorers at the North Pole, trapped with almost no food -- because they had no money even for stale bread and a few scraps. And thus they had to make do with whatever was in the house: near starvation. Francie quickly sees a catch:
“When explorers get hungry and suffer like that, it’s for a reason. Something big comes out of it. They discover the North Pole. But what big thing comes out of us being hungry like that?" (p. 215).
In short, it's a book full of wonderful observations about life in another time, but with so much that still resonates, I think. Francie's father could exist right now -- painfully, the huge issue in his life (beyond his alcoholism), was obtaining fair wages for his work as a waiter. This hasn't gotten any better in well over 100 years. He put it this way:
“Before I joined the Union the bosses paid me what they felt like. Sometimes they paid me nothing. The tips, they said, would take care of me. Some places even charged me for the privilege of working. The tips were so big, they said, that they could sell the waiting concession. Then I joined the Union. Your mother shouldn’t begrudge the dues. The Union gets me jobs where the boss has to pay me certain wages, regardless of tips. All trades should be unionized.” (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, p. 30).
Finally, I love the optimism the ending: Francie's hopeful departure for the college experience she always craved -- especially because she heads for Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan!
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| "And Francie had never had a doll except a two-inch one that cost a nickel." (p. 197) In this photo you can see my mother’s nickel dolls from around 1914. They were dressed by her sisters, and are around 3 inches tall. |
Review © 2022 mae sander.
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| From the Food Network: A Black Light Cocktail (source) |
My neighbors have started decorating their houses and lawns for Halloween, and everywhere I shop has Halloween candy. It’s time to think about the holiday, so I’ve been trying to make a list of classic literature for Halloween reading. Here are my favorites. I’ve read them all, mostly more than once, and enjoyed them, though some of them frightened me!
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| Gallup Park Boathouse |
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| My house last week, just before the leaves began to turn. |
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| Angelo's Diner: The sign seen from the back dining room. |
About the Artist:
"Tatyana Fazlalizadeh is a Brooklyn-based street artist and painter. She is from Oklahoma City, born to a Black mother and Iranian father. Her work is rooted in community engagement and the public sphere. She makes site specific work that considers how people, particularly women, queer folks, and Black and brown people, experience race and gender within their surrounding environments—from the sidewalk, to retail stores, to the church, to the workplace. Fazlalizadeh is the creator of Stop Telling Women to Smile, an international street art series that tackles gender-based street harassment" (source)
Shared with the Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz and with Sami's weekly murals.
All photos © 2022 mae sander.
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| Drone photo of the Ann Arbor Skyline |
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| Burns Park kids and tennis courts. |
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| Our guests last weekend with us in the park. |
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| Our neighborhood school. |
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| A local dragonfly for Eileen's Critters. |
Drone photos by Len and Evelyn. © 2022 for maefood dot blog spot dot com.
Worldwide, McDonalds sells several million hamburgers per day, maybe even as many as 50 million. My guess is that people eat them because they like the way they taste -- along with various other reasons, especially cost and convenience. But it seems to me that if you want to understand why people, especially children, want to eat McDonalds' burgers, it makes sense to at least consider how they taste. The French Fries, too. I am not sure that the book I just read really came to grips with the way that McDonalds appeals to the human sense of taste: the tastes of fat, salty meat, of the carb-loaded bun, and the sweet and slightly acidic tomato flavor of catsup. Sure, sophisticated eaters criticize such a taste, but many many people of every possible background find fast food good, whether they admit it or not.
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| Winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for History. |
"For too long, research on race and fast food has placed the onus solely on black palates and parents for the dismal state of black health. Without an understanding of how we got here, the food justice movement will never move beyond the idea of individual choice and continue to ignore structural disequilibrium. Knowing the caloric content and fat grams in a cheeseburger from Krystal is important. Educating the public on how much of the recommended daily allowance of sodium is exceeded by an order of Burger King onion rings is helpful. Promoting healthy lifestyles can improve lives. But understanding how shifts in the priorities of the mid-century civil rights struggle, changes in federal policy on business and urban development, and the boom years of fast food converged in the lives of black America is equally critical." (Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, p. 6).
One chapter after another provides details of many events in American Black history and the search for racial justice from the 1960s onward. Within the Civil Rights movement and within many political struggles against entrenched racism, Chatelain presents the interaction between the McDonald's Corporation and activists in Black communities in a number of American cities, especially Chicago, Cleveland, and Los Angeles. The author's knowledge and passion make this a wonderful story, though sometimes I found the details a bit overwhelming.
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| An illustration from Franchise, showing a Black-owned McDonald's spared during the 1992 riots in the ghetto of Los Angeles, another interesting area of historic study. (p. 197) |
As time went on, Chatelain says, healthy food became a national preoccupation, and many studies blamed fast food -- and people who chose it and gave it to their children -- for the increasing epidemic of obesity and food-related diseases:
"In the constant evaluation of black health as jeopardized, many public health advocates fixated on food choices and acknowledged the disproportionate numbers of fast food locations in black neighborhoods. But, few made the connection with the federal government’s concentrated, sustained efforts to bring more and more fast food into the inner city, nor did they see the handiwork of the civil rights authorities in sanctioning the process." (p. 252).
In other words, there's a down-side:
"The idea of financially sound black institutions is alluring across the ideological spectrum because it allows white conservatives and liberals alike to claim plausible deniability in their role in supporting systems and policies that maintain racial capitalism. Whether it’s called black capitalism or empowerment, the politics of black business can serve many interests, except for those of blacks most susceptible to the extremes of capitalism and racism." (p. 257).
At the end of the book, Chatelain returns to the question of parental choices in what to feed children:
"The castigation of the eating habits of poor people, or the choices they make for their children’s meals, obscures the origins of those choices." (p. 262).
As I've said, I found this book very interesting and full of wonderful insights about American Black history and the role of civil rights leaders and political leaders in applying pressure for a more just system. In this review I have barely touched on the richness of this history book and its treatment of many issues of justice, equal opportunity, and community development.
The only reservation I have about Franchise is the question of why McDonald's and most other fast food chains have such a strong appeal to consumers, which I believe is the taste of the food. People of all races, all classes, all economic levels, and many countries besides ours simply like to eat it. To really understand the way fast food flavors satisfy deep cravings requires reading at least one more book; for example, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss. It's all about the taste! (I dare you to write a comment here about how you don't like fast food: that's not the point.)
Review © 2022 mae sander.
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| Will this be our last time cooking outside until spring? Len made grilled lamb for our out-of-town visitors. |
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| Lamb, red wine, etc. served to our visitors Evelyn, Tom, and Alice. Photos by Alice. |
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| Breakfast: Len’s cinnamon bread. Also cofffee! |
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| Lentil and barley soup at Carol’s house. |
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| Broth with carrots and chick peas to be served with roasted vegetables and rice. |
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| Another dinner, made by Alice: ravioli, chicken, salad, wine. |
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| Lunch at the Slurping Turtle: a sushi roll and Diet Coke. |
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| Angelo’s Diner: Roast Beef Sub, fries, and Diet Coke. Indulgent? |
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| On the University of Michigan Campus: a new mural installation of enlarged charcoal sketches. I will post a more complete review of this exhibition when it is fully available. |
